Senators try to keep cuts from hitting home turf

“If we thought there were other options we would pursue them,” Hagen said in explaining the furloughs. “We don’t think there are any other options on the table.

“When you look at how our budget is structured, and when you look where we are in the fiscal year and how large a target we have to meet, these are mandatory permanent cuts. We don’t see any other way forward.”

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Blunt had been pursuing an approach to give agencies like FSIS more discretion in apportioning the cut among essential versus lower-priority personnel. But since the vast majority of FSIS employees are inspectors, the administration has warned that the math doesn’t work without more money.

That’s the approach now taken by the Pryor-Blunt amendment, and when all the puts and takes are calculated, the Senate bill would leave FSIS with about $980 million post-sequestration — or $21 million more than it otherwise would have.

House Republicans chided Hagen this week for not being better prepared for the cuts, but the record shows too that the agency’s budget has already been pared back in recent years.

Indeed, when translated into real inflation-adjusted dollars, the $980 million that would be left after sequestration and with the added Pryor-Blunt amendment is only modestly higher than what was provided to FSIS in 2008, the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

The Senate’s CR debate has been overshadowed by President Barack Obama’s visits to the Capitol this week and the higher profile press attention to tax and entitlements issues. But the 587-page bill is the closest thing the government will have to a real budget for the next six months and will have a major impact on how agencies cope in the wake of sequestration.

The goal is to update the base from which those March 1 cuts are made, and working with her ranking Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, Mikulski would do this by providing full-year budgets for six Cabinet departments and major science agencies—representing about two-thirds of the discretionary spending for 2013.

This is a significant expansion beyond the narrower CR passed last week by the House which focused most of its attention on two departments, Defense and Veterans Affairs. The Senate adds Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security, the Food and Drug Administration, NASA and NSF. And the bill includes about 105 so-called anomalies including provisions that would free up more than $720 million in highway and transit funds and open the door to up to $50 million in new U.S. aid to Syrian rebels.

The reaction from the White House and Boehner’s office has been generally favorable, but there are subtle but important distinctions between the Senate’s approach and that taken by the House GOP. The House bill appears more defensive, pumping money into potential hot spots that could become an embarrassment for lawmakers as the cuts hit home. The Senate bill is more a classic statement of priorities, even it means less money in some cases for politically sensitive accounts favored by the House.

For example, the Senate bill increases funding for Customs Border Patrol salaries and expenses by about $275 million but that is still roughly $85 million less what the House provided. In the case of cybersecurity at Homeland Security, it is the reverse: both bills again add more money but the Senate is higher than the House by about $18.5 million.

The same can be seen on two Western issues. The House adds significantly more than the Senate for wildland fire management in the Interior Department and Forest Service. The Senate does more than the House for the Indian Health Service.